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Samsung teams up with the popular adult cartoon series for a hilarious AR tour through their smart home product line-up. Confused or intimidated by the vast array of Samsung smart home products at your disposal? Samsung has your back with a their brand new Doorway platform, a smartphone-based AR tool designed to help guide users

William Shatner’s legacy in science fiction goes back more than 50 years. From TV to film to books to videogames, his voice and visage remain an iconic part of 20th century popular culture. The evolution of technologies that were merely imagined at the start of his career and realities by the end also gives Shatner some interesting perspective.

With regard to virtual reality in particular, it is clear Star Trek’s original captain has had some up close encounters in VR that left him concerned about how the technology is used in the future.

“It’s so real: it’s the stuff of nightmares … We’ve got to be really careful because you could put somebody into a psychosis,” Shatner recently told The Guardian.

Shatner just released a new memoir and spoke about VR in recent weeks with The Guardian. In the book he discusses getting himself captured digitally with “everything necessary to enable technicians to make my image move and speak realistically”.

“Shatner will now ‘live’ forever,” he jokes.

He also notes how VR capture technology can allow family members to essentially speak to loved ones from beyond the grave.

“The possibility of people, prior to dying, a little speech to a virtual-reality camera. Then you could put that by their grave and people who loved them, or were curious about them, could see them in their entirety, in absolute reality … There they are, saying, ‘my darling, I love you’,” Shatner said.

For those Star Trek fans out there with a good memory, you’ll recall this basic premise playing out in Star Trek: The Next Generation. In season 4 episode 2 of TNG (“Family”) Wesley Crusher comes face to face with a message from his long-dead father in the Holodeck.

When was the last time you played an action game where you had to put any real thought into reloading?

It’s an abstracted activity, most of the time, bound to a single button or key. Usually, you get into the habit of reloading after any exchange of fire. (Which means your character is leaving a bunch of partially-full magazines lying around everywhere, like that person you knew in college who was completely incapable of ever finishing an entire can of soda.) Reloading’s mostly just there in these games to provide a break in the action, some vague nod to realism, or some degree of additional tactical complexity, but you usually don’t have to think about it beyond that. Aside from the occasional mechanic like Gears of War’s “tactical reloads,” you just hit the button and forget about it.

The above demo and video interview are from a preview event held in October 2017

Blood and Truth, at least in its current state, is a game about that reloading. At its simplest level, it’s just a very British shooter (similar to its predecessor, London Heist) that’s more than a little reminiscent of old arcade games like Time Crisis. You move from cover to cover, shooting and being shot at. So far, so comfortably familiar.

You’ve got a realistic ammunition limit in your guns, and have to reload manually. Your character, a British special forces operative named Ryan Marks, carries spare magazines in a pouch on his chest. You use one controller to grab it with your character’s empty hand, then manually bring it to the port on your gun to reload. It doesn’t take long, but that’s a couple of seconds during which you aren’t returning fire, and that’s long enough to get you into trouble.

Not only is it weirdly immersive, but it really forces you to keep count of your shots in a way that a lot of other games simply don’t. I played a short demo version of Blood and Truth on the floor at PAX West, which was stripped down to its most basic elements. Marks’s family is in the clutches of an unnamed criminal element; Marks is entering a run-down part of the London Underground as part of his endeavors to find and rescue them. That run-down part of London, as it turns out, is the part where somebody’s been arming the chavs, and I ended up in a shootout with what appeared to be the most well-equipped group of football hooligans in the history of fiction.

Playing Blood & Truth made me think a lot about how much tactical-response stuff I’ve inadvertently picked up from years of increasingly realistic shooters, as well as how many terrible habits I’ve gotten into at the same time. For example, dual-wielding in this game is a really stupid idea, because you’ll run both guns dry in seconds, and then you have to laboriously holster at least one gun so you can reload the other.

Community Download is a weekly discussion-focused articles series published every Monday in which we pose a single, core question to you all, our readers, in the spirit of fostering discussion and debate.

Virtual reality is expensive and now that the Vive Wireless Adapter is on sale and available for pre-orders as of today, that price tag is immediately visible once again. Even if you’ve been fortunate enough to get in on the ground floor in these first few years as an early adopter of consumer-grade headsets, you’ve got to admit that the cost of entry (unless you grab a lower end Gear VR or Daydream View with your existing phone) is objectively expensive.

If you’ve already got a multi-hundred dollar PS4, it’s still going to cost you almost as much as the system itself to get a PSVR with all of its necessary equipment. And if you’ve got a ~$1,000 gaming PC, you’re still gonna have to drop a few hundred dollars to get a Windows VR headset or Oculus Rift, or even almost the cost of the PC to get a high-end Vive Pro setup. That’s a lot of money.

So after you’ve sank hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars getting VR-ready and buying games, if you want to go wireless and unlock even more freedom of movement inside virtual spaces (if you’ve got the space of course) then you need to drop another $300 for the official Vive Wireless Adapter + an addition ~$60 for an extra add-on if you have the Vive Pro. If you got an original Vive on day one and have only bought games in the last 2 1/2 years, $300 may not seem like too much to go wireless, but when you add it all up that’s a hefty chunk of change overall. Plus, pre-orders are now open but press have not been sent review units yet. Hopefully we can give a full assessment prior to its release in a few weeks.

Obviously we know why it’s so expensive. Cutting-edge technology always is at first, and then newer, better things come out and drive the price of older hardware down. It’s the circle of life.

But the question at hand, even still, is this: Do you think the Vive Wireless Adapter is too expensive at $300? If so, what would be a better price? If not, why do you think it seems reasonable?

Augmented art application ‘4th Wall’ launches location-specific, collaborative art exhibition to inspire “thoughtful dialogue.” Originally released February of this year, Nancy Bake Cahill’s art app, 4th Wall, gives users the opportunity to take a closer look at some of the artists captivating pieces of VR artwork from the comfort of their home via AR technology.

Beat Saber may one day come to mobile VR headsets but, for now, RJdoesVR’s Hardlight Blade has beaten it to the punch.

The Oculus Go game, which sees players using a lightsaber-like blade to fight off waves of incoming enemy robots, is getting a new mode in the near future and, you guessed it, it’s pretty much a Beat Saber clone. You slice notes to the beat with Go’s motion controller. Check it out in the video at this link.

Looks more than a little similar, doesn’t it? To be fair, this mode is going to come with a cool feature, allowing you to store MP3 files on Go’s music folder and then upload them to the game, which will automatically generate beat maps for it. We can’t speak to how well this effect will be achieved, though.

It’ll certainly be interesting to see how Beat Saber’s gameplay holds up with Go’s motion controller, which only offers three degrees of freedom (3DOF) tracking. Judging by the gameplay, it looks like you’ll simply need to rotate and then tilt the controller to slash the single lightsaber, then, while Beat Saber’s 6DOF tracking on PC VR headsets allows you to fully wield two weapons.

Hardlight Blade isn’t the first game to take a page from the book of beats; back at Gamescom last month we saw a new arcade game named Holobeat that was essentially just Beat Saber for four players. We’re beginning to wonder what Beat Games makes of all the imitation, though Beat Saber itself obviously borrows from Star Wars as well as VR games like Audioshield.

By the end of the week there will be one more place for you to experience Tender Claws’ brilliant Virtual-Virtual Reality.

The surrealist story game will be arriving on Steam with full HTC Vive support (along with pre-existing Oculus Rift support) on Friday, September 7th. A final price hasn’t been revealed but we’d expect it to cost $19.99, seeing as that’s what it costs on Rift over on Oculus Home. If you have a Google Daydream, Gear VR or Oculus Go, though, it’s also available for $9.99 and just as good on those platforms.

Virtual-Virtual Reality teleports players into a future in which AI constructs serve the will of their dream-seeking clients in an online metaverse. It’s often bizarre and hilarious, but it carries a key core message that’s not to be overlooked and is one of the best narrative-lead VR experiences yet.

Earlier this year we wrote about why this is a game you still need to play. “Budget Cuts might have the tone, The Lab might have the authenticity, but for my money Virtual-Virtual Reality is the closest we’ve gotten to VR’s Portal 2 yet,” we said. “I can’t wait to see what Tender Claws does next.”

That still stands.

That only leaves PlayStation VR (PSVR) as the last major platform for the game to come to. Fingers crossed that happens soon.